Fall 2025 · Vol. 54 No. 2 · pp. 297–299
Book Review
Bloody Brutal, and Barbaric? Wrestling with Troubling War Texts
Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Academic, 2019. 397 pages.
Mennonite Brethren seeking to be true to the Confession of Faith regarding peacemaking will find helpful “cobelligerents” in the authors of Bloody, Brutal, and Barbaric? The authors are adjunct professors at Tyndale Seminary in Toronto and formerly professors at Heritage Seminary in Ontario: William J. Webb is a theologian and ordained Baptist minister, and Gordon Oeste is the teaching pastor at Cedar Creek Community Church in Cambridge, Ontario. They seek a middle ground between a traditional reading of Old Testament (OT) war texts, that sees “no ethical problems” with divine instructions to God’s people to commit war crimes, including rape and genocide, and a subversive or radical viewpoint that finds such texts “utterly repulsive.” The authors position themselves on the spectrum between traditionalists Eugene Merrill, Daniel Gard, and Tremper Longman III, who see holy war commands from God as part of God’s pristine righteousness, and antitraditionalists Eric Seibert and Gregory Boyd, who argue that Moses’ genocide instructions are not God’s revealed directives (20).
Key to their argument and most helpful for Direction readers is the authors’ assertion that contemporary interpreters must distinguish between (a) the “story-line question” on the minds of ancient readers, which asks p. 298 whether God is just in removing from God’s sacred space “Canaanite” idolaters (a term that is the literary creation of the biblical authors and includes Adam and Eve as well as exilic Israel in addition to the historical ethnic Canaanites cited in Joshua and Judges), and (b) the contemporary military-ethics question about the use of reasonable force or violence. The authors develop and defend, logically and with extensive biblical references, six theses that are woven together to form their argument. In addition to the first thesis regarding asking the right questions (above), the authors seek to make the case that (2) biblical “total-kill rhetoric” (leaving no survivors) is hyperbolic, (3) God accommodates ancient “ethical deficiencies,” (4) God tugs his people toward redemption for all people with incremental steps relative to ancient war practices, (5) the portraits of Warrior Yahweh and Apocalyptic Victor Jesus converge in the Gospels’ presentation of Jesus, and (6) the longer trajectory of God’s justice story is unfinished.
As noted, this reviewer finds most helpful the authors’ assertion that the contemporary question regarding the morality of war and violence is not the question of the ancients. Additionally, the last three chapters offer helpful biblical theological reflections on (1) the OT perspective that Yahweh is a peacemaker who seeks to refocus God’s people from dependence on violence to the inclusion of all peoples, (2) the presentation of Jesus in the Gospels as God’s antidote to violence through his cruciform ethics, and (3) the interpretation of Jesus as presented in Revelation as the Lamb who was slain to defeat the powers of violence.
The book reflects a fourteen-year journey for Webb (about half of that in active collaboration with Oeste) seeking resolution of questions of theodicy prompted by the suffering and death of his own child and by questions raised by thoughtful Bible readers who find the OT war stories incongruous with Jesus, the God of peace. While the authors succeed in demonstrating that the ancient biblical storytelling suggests an antiwar ethic that emerges more clearly in the New Testament, their argument would be strengthened with greater clarity in the following three areas.
One, the hermeneutical question regarding God’s justice makes assumptions about the audience and purpose of the biblical text without explanation. The argument would be clearer if the authors were to explain what they assume regarding date, social and geographical location of the ancient hermeneutical community, and the text itself. Perhaps it is more plausible to view the text as testimony coming from opposing perspectives regarding the use of violence (see Brueggemann’s Theology of the Old Testament: Testimony, Dispute, and Advocacy, 1997). Is it possible that, then as now, different writers have different views of how God speaks and works? p. 299
Two, what is the place of historiography in the biblical text? Even if the reader accepts the hyperbole thesis, how reliable are the texts in conveying historical details about war? What is the place of the population explosion in the highlands of Canaan in the time narrated in the biblical books of Joshua and Judges? What is the role of the city-state and its royal administrative structure? What is a “Canaanite”?
Three, the fourteenth chapter, “Yahweh as Uneasy War God,” resonates with Elmer Martens’ perspectives in God’s Design (4th ed., 2015) and The Power of the Lamb (“The Lord Is a Warrior,” 1986) in its critique of the monarchical war machine. What is the place of subversive texts in the faith community? If these texts offer a critique of military violence, how might this soften these authors’ critique of the more radical antitraditional readings of Boyd and Seibert?
Webb and Oeste argue that the biblical narrative demonstrates that the war stories of ancient Israel are less Bloody, Brutal, and Barbaric than the surrounding empires and place the reader on a trajectory realized in the Jesus of the Gospels. While the contemporary reader may be overwhelmed by the book’s detailed argumentation and lists of biblical references, the question raised about the purpose of the text in the world of the ancient reader makes Bloody, Brutal, and Barbaric a rewarding read.
